I am growing skeptical. The taxes we pay increasingly define our attitudes towards the services they support. This spring, I’ve been following the New Hampshire Legislature as they craft policy and the state’s next budget. What strikes me is the extent to which we all have vastly different relationships with the various operations of our state.

Take a moment to consider your contribution to New Hampshire’s General Fund. You may have a general sense of what your taxes support, such as health and human services or public safety, but it’s impossible to calculate your individual share of these complex, essential services. They are, in a sense, abstract, and easy to overlook.

In stark contrast, your property tax bill tells a clear story of what educating the children of our community costs you. In ConVal, the amount of your property tax paid directly to our public school stares you right in the face; across the district, it averages 62.16% of your total tax bill.

How we feel about our public schools is being driven by the hypervisibility of this cost. Our judgment and the conversations we have around education become clouded as a result. It is human nature to react more strongly to what we see most clearly.

The economist Daniel Kahneman developed the theory of the focusing illusion alongside his research of cognitive bias. He found that salience, or visibility, drives attention, especially political attention. Visibility alone can trigger public outrage, and this outrage prioritizes symbolic and reactive solutions while ignoring the root causes of systemic problems.

As the cost of running our public schools has risen, and property taxes have becomemincreasingly more burdensome, the easiest and often quickest solution that comes to mind is to slash school funding. In our neighboring towns of Jaffrey and Rindge, residents who were concerned about rising costs voted to cut over $3 million from their school’s budget, thus imperilling the district’s services.

Similar reactionary petitioned budget caps have also appeared across our state. We here in ConVal just faced a budget cap amendment that threatened a cut of several million dollars and would have stripped our schools to the bone.

Unfortunately, legislative solutions also fall victim to quick thinking. Despite the fact that every district facing a budget cap overwhelmingly voted it down, legislators in the House proposed their own state-instituted budget cap. Their other solutions to the troubling effects of inequitably and underfunded schools, open enrollment and the expansion of Education Freedom Accounts, merely offer those with means an escape from their home district or the public schools at large.

We need to acknowledge a fundamental truth – New Hampshire’s system for funding education is broken. Property taxes are regressive. They do not reflect a taxpayer’s ability to pay; they disadvantage lower-income households and lower-property-valued communities.

The debate between funding education and the growing burden of property taxes presents a false choice. It does not have to be this way. No other state relies, to the degree we do, on property tax to fund schools. Surprisingly, the methodology of funding education across the United State doesn’t fall along familiar partisan lines. For instance, Idaho, Kansas, Indiana and Alabama contribute nearly twice, on a percentage basis, what New Hampshire does to education via statewide taxes. 

The evaluation of the performance of our public schools also falls prey to an illusion of focus. Standardized test scores have an outsized role in how the public and parents perceive the quality of our schools. Yet study after study shows that these assessments are merely reflective of demographics at large and the level of income and prior education attained by a child’s parents or guardians. These tests do not measure individual student growth or the ability of a school to help struggling learners.

Perhaps the one thing our state could learn from these tests, which schools could benefit from more resources, is wholly ignored. Blaming schools, especially when they may be the only institution supporting these children, is misguided and self-defeating.

Good leadership requires clear vision, but so does good citizenship. If we want strong schools and fair taxation, we must think beyond what’s easiest to see. The visibility of property taxes makes schools an easy target, but real solutions require deeper understanding and shared responsibility. We need lawmakers willing to face the complexity and citizens willing to engage beyond their own frustration. The future of public education in New Hampshire depends on our ability to look past the illusion and act for the common good.

Curtis Hamilton is Greenfield’s School Board representative to the ConVal School District. His opinions are his own.